Steve Sailer recently wrote an essay titled In This House We Believe: The Protestant Roots of Wokeness. Sailer states that his intent is to argue against what he calls the “obsession among callow rightists about declaring wokeness a foreign, un-American import by Marxists or Jews or Jewish Marxists or whatever.” With all the talk about... Read More

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century Charles King Doubleday, 2019 The description of Charles King at Amazon: We all know the scenario. We see a great cultural shift occurring before our eyes and seek to ascribe a reason. It’s only natural;... Read More

Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory is an important dimension of modern Jewish history and thought. While Jewish leaders and intellectuals have used the science of evolution to bolster notions of Jewish identity, they have also confronted and (often fiercely resisted) the use of evolutionary theory to conceptualize conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Published in 2006,... Read More

When did humans first become human? The answer is far from simple, because the question assumes that sometime in the past, humans achieved modernity and were locked within an evolutionary loophole where natural selection no longer applies. Despite the absurdity of this scenario, and in stark contrast to empirical data, it is widely believed that... Read More

The interwar years gave antiracism a new lease on life, thus reversing a long decline that had begun in the late 19th century. This reversal was driven largely by two events: the acrimonious debate over U.S. immigration in the mid-1920s and Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. Many people, especially academics, were convinced... Read More

After peaking in the mid-19th century, antiracism fell into decline in the U.S., remaining dominant only in the Northeast. By the 1930s, however, it was clearly reviving, largely through the efforts of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. But a timid revival had already begun during the previous two decades. In the political arena,... Read More

Antiracism has roots that go back to early Christianity and the assimilationist Roman and Hellenistic empires. In its modern form, however, it is a much more recent development, particularly in its special focus on relations between whites and blacks and its emphasis on discrimination as the cause of any mental or behavioral differences. Modern antiracism... Read More

A synthesis has been forming in the field of human biodiversity. It may be summarized as follows: 1. Human evolution did not end in the Pleistocene or even slow down. In fact, it speeded up with the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, when the pace of genetic change rose over a hundred-fold. Humans were... Read More

Throughout the world, kinship used to define the limits of morality. The less related you were to someone, the less moral you had to be with him or her. We see this in the Ten Commandments. The phrase "against thy neighbor" qualifies the commandment against bearing false witness and, implicitly, the preceding ones against killing,... Read More

When Franz Boas died in 1942, the leadership of his school of anthropology passed to Ruth Benedict and not to Margaret Mead. This was partly because Benedict was the older of the two and partly because her book Patterns of Culture (1934) had already assumed a key role in defining Boasian anthropology. The word "define"... Read More

The anthropologist Franz Boas is remembered for moving the social sciences away from genetic determinism and toward environmental determinism. In reality, he felt that genes do contribute substantially to mental and behavioral differences ... and not just between individuals. Most of us identify with certain great teachers of the past: Christ, Marx, Freud … Though... Read More